4of7Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro speaks during a presidential forum at the California Democratic Party’s in Long Beach.Photo: Chris Carlson / Associated Press

LONG BEACH — The newest Democrat running for president, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, crashed the California Democratic Party convention Saturday, and the reaction was a resounding … meh?

And sometimes, worse.

“No, absolutely not, we don’t need him,” said Gloria Alvarado, a delegate from Orange County, who is deciding between former Vice President Joe Biden and California Sen. Kamala Harris. “People have been running for two years. We’ve got enough now.”

It didn’t help that Patrick’s anodyne, off-the-rack Democrat-stump speech fell flat in front of the 3,000 party delegates and 2,000 top statewide activists at the Long Beach Convention Center. Most had come to hear eight top Democratic candidates be interviewed individually at a forum later in the day, focused on Latino issues and sponsored by Univision.

Patrick, 63, launched his candidacy Thursday — just before the deadline to file for the New Hampshire primary — and has no staff in California. He was considering a run a year ago, but declined as his wife had just been diagnosed with early stage uterine cancer. She is now cancer free.

“I’ve been watching the race, and it is by no means settled,” Patrick told reporters. While he said he respected that some voters had committed to candidates, “I don’t think that the whole field of voters is committed.”

His speech offered little to distinguish him from the field as he offered bromides about “not running to be president of the Democrats. I’m running to be president of the United States. There’s a difference.”

Afterward, Patrick demurred when asked to explain why his candidacy would be better than Biden’s — his primary rival for the center-left lane in the primary. He contrasted himself with Biden, a career politician, by stressing his combination of government work and private sector experience — he was a top lawyer at Texaco and Coca-Cola as well as in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. That, Patrick said, is what “we’re going to need given the complexity of problems that we’re trying to face.”

Patrick took a subtle dig at Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are promoting some of the more progressive health care and tax plans in the field. “We have to acknowledge that if you want to get to an ambitious goal, you have to bring other people along, not climb over them to get there,” he said.

He will face another problem in the Democratic primary race. Until last week, he was a managing director at Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Democrats attacked Mitt Romney for working at during President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Patrick should know; he was a co-chair of his friend Obama’s campaign.

Patrick disavowed the Obama campaign’s attacks on Bain, saying “I didn’t buy that line then, and I don’t now.”

Patrick tried to recast his Bain work as being progressive because he was working in a part of the firm that invested in companies that “produce both a financial return and measurable social or environmental impact.

“That’s what we need,” he said. “We need business to come off the sidelines and stop leaving the consequences of the private industry to government and philanthropy alone.”

Explaining the benevolence of private equity might be a tough sell in a primary where Warren — who is running on several tax-the-rich proposals — is running a close second behind Biden nationally and virtually tied with him in California, according to recent polls.

Presidential candidates Tom Steyer (left) and Pete Buttigieg, who leads in the most recent Iowa polls, attend the California Democratic convention in Long Beach.

Photo: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times

“Don’t put me in a box. I don’t fit in one,” Patrick said Saturday. “By the way, neither do most voters.”

Neither Warren nor Biden attended the convention. Biden spent Saturday at a fundraising event in Portland, Ore., and Warren was campaigning in Iowa.

It is the third major party event in California that Biden has skipped this year. There is little advantage in him attending, as he would be likely to be booed by a delegation that skews more left than the general electorate. Support for Medicare for All is strong among delegates, and the party endorsed then-state Sen Kevin de León over the more moderate Sen. Dianne Feinstein in last year’s Senate race.

California Democratic Party Chairman Rusty Hicks ripped Warren and Biden for shunning the convention and forum, calling it “a misguided decision to publicly snub California’s Democrats and Latino voters across the nation.”

Sanders is the most popular Democrat among Latino voters, according to a Latino Decisions survey of 807 registered votes who are likely to vote in the March 3 primary. Sanders was the favorite candidate of 31% of those surveyed, followed by Biden at 22%, Warren, at 11%, former federal housing secretary Julián Castro, at 9%, and Harris at 8%.

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Jacqueline Martinez Garcel, CEO of Latino Community Foundation, which commissioned the survey, credited Sanders’ popularity to his campaign hiring staffers in traditionally Latino areas such as East Los Angeles and Fresno.

“Whatever you feel about him or his agenda, he’s getting people into the community and connecting with voters,” Garcel said.

South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg received good news Saturday at the convention when a new poll from Iowa showed him leading among likely caucus-goers for the first time. Buttigieg was backed by 25% of likely caucus goers, with Warren supported by 16% and Biden and Sanders at 16%, according to the poll from the Des Moines Register and CNN.

But the electorate looks much different in predominantly white Iowa compared with California, where Buttigieg is struggling to get Latino support — or find people who know his name. Nearly half of those surveyed in the Latino Decisions poll had no opinion of Buttigieg, and he had the support of only 1% of those surveyed, seventh among the candidates.

“What that tells us is that we have a huge opportunity here,” Buttigieg said of his poor showing among California Latinos. “We’re not even known to a lot of voters who have a lot going on in their lives and have not been following the blow by blow with the nominating process like a lot of people in this room.”

Harris found some refuge at the convention at events like “Dems, Drinks and Drag Queens” at a local club, where she was cheered heartily. But inside the convention hall, she was forced to respond to a series of stories about infighting in her campaign amid sinking poll numbers.

“I am very supportive of my campaign and of the people working in it,” Harris said Saturday. “They have done great work, which has gotten us to the point where we are today.”

Joe Garofoli is the San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer, covering national and state politics. He has worked at The Chronicle since 2000 and in Bay Area journalism since 1992, when he left the Milwaukee Journal. He is the host of “It’s All Political,” The Chronicle’s political podcast. Catch it here: bit.ly/2LSAUjA

He has won numerous awards and covered everything from fashion to the Jeffrey Dahmer serial killings to two Olympic Games to his own vasectomy — which he discussed on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” after being told he couldn’t say the word “balls” on the air. He regularly appears on Bay Area radio and TV talking politics and is available to entertain at bar mitzvahs and First Communions. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a proud native of Pittsburgh. Go Steelers!